Vaucasy

Vaucasy

n.
the fear that you’re little more than a product of your circumstances, that for all the thought you put into shaping your beliefs and behaviors and relationships, you’re essentially a dog being trained by whatever stimuli you happen to encounter—reflexively drawn to whoever gives you reliable hits of pleasure, skeptical of ideas that make you feel powerless.

From Jacques de Vaucanson, a French engineer who built a series of lifelike programmable machines (automata), including his masterpiece the Digesting Duck, which could flap its wings and quack, drink water, and digest bits of grain into simulated excrement. Pronounced “vaw-kuh- see.”

Viadne

Nighthawk

Emodox

Flichtish

Mcfeely

Aesthosis

Trueholding

Addleworth

The Giltwrights

Nementia

Altschmerz

Indosentia

Vicarous

Maugry

1202

Povism

Liberosis

The Standard Blues

1202

Anecdoche

Povism

Emorries

a magnifying glass over photos and books

Present-Tense

a close-up of a stopwatch

Falesia

Ecsis

a hand holding a fossil

Rialtoscuro

a blurry image of a light source

Sayfish